one-off at the wrist

Archive for the month “January, 2018”

Always found his ‘experimental’ sounds [collaborating with the early electronic musicians in Berlin] and his ‘cut up’ lyric writing style hugely more interesting than his higher selling ‘pop’ stuff from the 1980s.

William Gibson’s poem played from a 3½-inch diskette on a 1992-era Mac computer running the System 7 operating system. When the diskette ran, the text of the poem scrolled up the screen (accompanied by infrequent sound effects—a camera shutter click, a gun going off—while an encryption program on the diskette encoded each line and made the poem “disappear” after its first reading. A one time only text.

On December 9, 2008, the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting Agrippa, there was an emulated run of the poem based on a bit-level copy of an original diskette loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff.

It has always interested me how data can be played back when the original recording / decoding [playback] machines no longer function

I have to admit I always thought the depiction in Herge’s Prisoners of the Sun to be rather daft; given that the Inca were an ancient civilization whose main god was the sun. I think they might have known more about eclipses far earlier than Europeans?

Being able to predict the location, duration and spread of eclipses is fascinating. The solar annular eclipse in 2021 seems rather grand in shape; as all the solar eclipses near the poles seem? Apparently though most years have two solar eclipses there can be as many as five. Unfortunately the next time that will happen will be in 2206.